Everyday life is experienced as a heroic quest and played as a game.
Lawrence G. Boldt
Zen and the Art of Making a Living
Category: Experience
Gaining new experiences.
At this crossroads, the metaphorical armor we’ve self-forged and worn over the years symbolizes our strength and determination to guard against life’s challenges. Yet, in these moments, we recognize the weight of this armor and how it distances us from genuine connection and joy. Our challenge is discerning when this armor, once protective, now hinders our engagement with life’s full spectrum of experiences.
Echoing through this journey is the profound reminder that we must choose: the safety of the known or the courage to experience the mystery. This choice becomes a dance with what one could call “fierce vulnerability,” a term that captures the valor required to remain fully present to the conviction of a full life.
Steven Morris
Armor Down: A Midlife Reflection on Fierce Vulnerability
Do not take life’s experiences too seriously. For in reality they are nothing but dream experiences. Play your part in life, but never forget that it is only a role.
Paramahansa Yogananda
We see this especially in the midst or aftermath of transitional and transformational life events, when greater-than-usual shifts occur. As the result of going through such experiences, we often develop new values, core needs and centrally motivating desires, losing other values, needs and desires in the process. In other words, after undergoing a particularly transformative experience, we become different people in key respects than we were before. If after such a personal transformation, our friends are unable to meet our newly developed core needs or recognise and affirm our new values and central desires – perhaps in large part because they cannot, because they do not (yet) recognise or understand who we have become – we will suffer loneliness.
This is what happened to me after Italy. By the time I got back, I had developed new core needs – as one example, the need for a certain level and kind of intellectual engagement – which were unmet when I returned home. What’s more, I did not think it particularly fair to expect my friends to meet these needs. After all, they did not possess the conceptual frameworks for discussing Russian absurdism or 13th-century Italian love sonnets; these just weren’t things they had spent time thinking about. And I didn’t blame them; expecting them to develop or care about developing such a conceptual framework seemed to me ridiculous. Even so, without a shared framework, I felt unable to meet my need for intellectual engagement and communicate to my friends the fullness of my inner life, which was overtaken by quite specific aesthetic values, values that shaped how I saw the world. As a result, I felt lonely.
Kaitlyn Creasy
Loved, Yet Lonely
This book is about the life and death and rebirth of myth. For those who have fallen out of myth, the experiences described here may be familiar, but for those who are able to live inside the cultural myths, these experiences may seem alien. I write for those who have experienced the loss of vitality and hold the secret in lonely isolation; for those, as Jung said, who, “…find themselves in the wilderness”; those who for whom personal meaning becomes a way of life.
D. Stephenson Bond
Living Myth: Personal Meaning as a Way of Life
Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad. The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of. If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters to a Young Poet
Categories
Helping Move Others Into a New World
Here’s the thing. The most successful brands today – whether it’s Starbucks or Apple or Oprah or Lady Gaga – aren’t just different. They create difference. They don’t just reflect the culture or find ways to agree with the consumer, they actively shape the culture. They’re not afraid to challenge or provoke; hell, they maybe live for that stuff. They are cultural entrepreneurs. They take something familiar – coffee, a cell phone, daytime TV, pop music, – and find a way to reframe the experience around it that changes the way we look at and think about it, that transforms the way we make it a part of our lives. Through the intense projection of a bold and particular point of view, they rework the story, they create a new kind of cultural myth that draws us in until it becomes our myth too. They’re not necessarily making an innovative product so much as an innovative cultural viewpoint (that just happens to sell that particular product).
Getting back to myth again, what these brands do is put us through a kind of initiation. They uproot us from established beliefs and customs – like the idea that coffee shouldn’t cost more than a dollar a cup. They move us into a new world (where a coffee costs four dollars). Think of an Apple store, with its own unique layout and design and vocabulary (it doesn’t have a help desk, it has a genius bar). In this new world, the brand acts as mentor. It gives us a tool or a skill or an insight that helps us advance toward self-actualization. When we leave that world, and return to our ordinary world, we take that gift with us and apply it to changing our life in some small but notable way. Through word-of-mouth we share that boon with our community.
It might be worth asking yourself, what do you believe that nobody else believes? How can you express that belief through your product or service in a way that someone else might find relevant and even self-enhancing? Don’t just ask, who is your consumer – ask, who do you want your consumer to become? What kind of story can you tell around your product or service to help him become that? How can you build out the world of your story so that the consumer can find different ways of entering it and interacting with it — especially in this day and age of social media?
I don’t think in terms of platform anymore; your platform is your storyworld for the consumer to explore and get lost in.
Justine Musk
Don’t Lose The Snake: Creativity, Difference The Bold Point of View
Categories
Integrating Mythological Experiences
A living myth is in many ways a fantasy that has become a way of life. To me, the most vital aspect of mythology is not found in the stories of gods and goddesses of long ago, nor in the the psychological truths those stories reflect, but rather in the contemporary framework of images and meaning that are found in our way of life—the rhythm and structure of our weekly, monthly, and yearly cycles—and the myth that informs our life.
The problem is, however, that we don’t trust our own mythic imagination. In fact, the eruption of mythological fantasies in a person’s life is a psychological problem of a first degree. Other cultures in other times had ways of integrating mythological experiences into the whole fabric of personal and social life. We, by contrast, often don’t know what to make of such experiences.
D. Stephenson Bond
Living Myth: Personal Meaning as a Way of Life
Categories
Seeing the World in a New Way
It’s never enough to just tell people about some new insight. Rather, you have to get them to experience it a way that evokes its power and possibility. Instead of pouring knowledge into people’s heads, you need to help them grind anew set of eyeglasses so they can see the world in a new way.
John Seely Brown
Categories
Letting My Experience Carry Me On
Letting my experience carry me on, in a direction which appears to be forward, toward goals that I can but dimly define, as I try to understand at least the current meaning of that experience.
Carl Rogers
On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy